Roger Cohen, SEPT. 6, 2017, New York Times
Image from article, with caption: "Removing a statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee in New Orleans in May."
In moments of national fragility, history rears its head. The past becomes a vast
storehouse of grievance. Revived memory is manipulated to produce violent
nationalism. This is what is happening today in the United States, a nation suddenly
at war with its past.
There is a reason for this war. America has been adept at evasion. A nation
conceived as exceptional, a beacon to the world, could not but run from its original
sin. How often I have wondered at all the museums and memorials to the Holocaust,
the great crime against European Jewry that did not happen here, of which the
United States was neither perpetrator nor victim. By comparison, the great American
crime of slavery, the laceration and lynching of black bodies, was scarcely
memorialized.
Today there is a movement in people’s minds. If the 20th century saw
decolonization and the fall of empires, the 21st century is seeing the internal
corollary of that process: a relentless challenge in Western societies to the white
mind-set, white assumptions, white amnesia. How, after all, could those Confederate
statues stand for so long and so prominently in so many American cities when they
memorialized men who took up arms for slavery and in opposition to the Union?
It is hard and painful to refute your ancestry, disentangle individual honor from
a lost and morally indefensible cause like that of the Confederacy, knit together a
nation after a Civil War and 750,000 dead. Evasions accumulate. The South nursed
its wounds, rewrote the story, adjusted the cause. Slavery died; Jim Crow began. The
long struggle endured for black Americans to be heard, to be seen, to be equal before
the law, to be not three-fifths of a human being but human beings in full.
Yet, the issue behind the obfuscations was clear enough, enunciated by
Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, who put his “great truth”
in unequivocal terms: “That the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery —
subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” Or, as
Mississippi declared in seceding, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the
institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.”
This is the cause for which Gen. Robert E. Lee fought; and it was of course the
proposed removal of his statue in Charlottesville that precipitated the violence last
month between leftists and the white supremacists who wanted Lee kept in place
and were willing, in one instance, to kill for him.
Despite the killing of a 32-year-old woman, President Trump saw “blame on
both sides” and “very fine people” marching alongside the neo-Nazis. So, too, did
many of his supporters. Charlottesville was a catalyst. From Baltimore to
Birmingham, with a fearful haste, Confederate statues were removed or hidden, their
ultimate fate unclear.
The abrupt removal of the statues seemed to set a limit at last to what
Americat-the-beacon can conceal of its shadows. In his book
“Between the World and Me,” Ta-Nehisi Coates writes, “In America,
it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” Enslavement,
he continues, “was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor” but
“rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.”
So let it be said, loud and clear; and let the statuary that appears to honor this
enterprise be cleared from American public spaces; or, if any is to remain, ensure the
context is clear enough to preclude veneration.
Nothing, when it comes to memory, is simple. Memory is emotion. There is a
danger in the rush to remove these statues. To excise history is to risk being
punished by it. I learned that long ago when I covered the Bosnian war. The war was
a lesson, written in blood, of the prison that bad or suppressed history can be. To go
to Bosnia was to grow familiar with ghosts. Such ghosts are no less potent in the
American South.
The statues now being upended tell a story, after all. Not the story they were
erected to propagate — of Confederate valor — but of an attempt in defeat to mask
the terrible “great truth” of the Confederacy and by so doing extend for many
decades the subjugation and humiliation of American blacks. The statues are part of
American history; consigning them to oblivion does not help.
They should be gathered in museums, or a museum, where their lesson can be
taught and debated. Lonnie Bunch III, the director of the Smithsonian’s National
Museum of African American History and Culture (which opened last year in
Washington 23 years after the Holocaust Memorial Museum), told my colleagues
Robin Pogrebin and Sopan Deb: “I am loath to erase history.” He is right.
Trump represents a backlash against the challenge to the white mind-set, white
assumptions and white amnesia that I mentioned. He wants to build a dike against
the 21st-century movement in people’s minds. The dike won’t hold, the current of
history will wash him away. But how is an open question — and it’s worth recalling
in a divided America just how combustible memory is. [JB emphasis]
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